Spike TV recently announced it’s working on a reality series called “Last Family on Earth” which will feature survivalists competing to show how resourceful they can be in various extreme situations. The winning family will receive a bunker in an undisclosed location, to improve their chances of surviving Armageddon.

The calendar of the ancient Mayan civilization predicts the world will end in December of 2012, and with rumors of an impending zombie apocalypse and news stories about crazy cannibals spurring up in the last few weeks, some people are finding it hard not to succumb to the paranoia. So I guess the Spike television network couldn’t have picked a better time to announce their upcoming reality show, Last Family on Earth, in which several families of convinced survivalists will complete to win an actual underground bunker.

Rendering of Vivos bunker for the winning family – AP photo

Sharon Levy, executive vice president of original programming at Spike, says the show doesn’t necessarily coincide with the hype around the Mayan calendar. Polls show 15% of the world’s population actually believes in a soon-to-happen catastrophic event (earthquake, epidemic, etc.) that will threaten the survival of our civilization, and these are the people who will participate on their show. “We don’t think there’s anything funny about that,” Levy said. “We think it’s a very interesting segment of the population that is very prepared, is highly intelligent. These are regular people. These are not people that you may think are living in a shelter in the middle of the woods. These could be your friends.”

Rendering of Vivos luxury bunkers

The families involved in the Last Family on Earth show haven’t been selected yet, but it’s been revealed the series will test their endurance and physical skills, as well as their leadership abilities, integrity and character, by putting them through various doomsday scenarios, including a pandemic, global government or economic collapse, nuclear war, reactor meltdowns, solar flares, massive asteroids, lethal climactic change, a pole shift, calamitous earthquakes, and even widespread anarchy. The winners will be decided by a panel of survival experts, with the audience having a say through social media. The ultimate survivalist family will receive their very own state of the art bunker, built to withstand almost any kind of disaster scenario.

Although only six episodes of The Last Family on Earth have been ordered so far, if it proves a success, there’s no reason why the show couldn’t last for a few seasons. That’s if the world doesn’t end in December, of course.